Hagar the Horrible

Two posts that were forming incoherently in the vacuous space I call my mind latched onto each other on my way home from teaching this morning and have produced a mutant child.

I. Once when my dad was visiting some time ago, he noticed the many large white boxes filled with comic books that were crowding Foxy J's and my already-crowded room. He saw this as a problem and immediately began brainstorming as to how we could fix it. Maybe we could put in some shelves, or maybe we could lay a piece of wood over the boxes to make a sort of desktop, or maybe we could raise the bed in order to put the boxes underneath. (I don't remember, by the way, that these were the actual solutions he proposed--I'm making them up, but the point is that he came up with several viable solutions pretty quickly.) The fact is that neither Foxy nor I saw the growing mound of white boxes as a problem that needed solving, so we thanked Dad for the suggestions and politely declined the offer to carry any of them out.

The funny thing, though, is that my mind works exactly like my dad's. I don't know whether it's a Fob thing or a male thing or a male Fob thing, but I can't see a problem and not try to solve it. I spend my life noticing cosmic tilted frames and doing my best to straighten them. This is not a bad thing, in and of itself. I solve a lot of problems with this particular neurosis of mine. All the king's men despair at the mass of shattered egg shell, while I figure out where to start gluing. The downside is that sometimes problems are not solvable. Or, sometimes, people just want to tell you about their problems without you trying to solve them. (Apologies to all my friends I try to fix on a regular basis.) And sometimes I think I've got something figured out and I proceed with my solution, but pretty soon I'll realize that it would have been better to leave well enough alone and let the problem fix itself.

II. Last night Foxy and I read the story of Abram and Sarai and Hagar in Genesis. See, Abram and Sarai are getting old and they haven't had any kids yet. They really want kids, and it kills them to think they'll die soon without leaving any posterity behind. They've seen the fertility specialist in Canaan and he can't help them. They've considered in vitro fertilization, sperm donation, egg donation, fertility drugs, but then they remembered that none of those things will be invented for another five thousand years. As far as they can tell, there is no hope. But Sarai has this servant, Hagar, an Egyptian with good childbearing hips. So Sarai gets a brilliant idea. She says to Abram, "Look, the Lord has kept me from bearing. Consort with my maid; perhaps I shall have a son through her" (Gen. 16.2, New JPS Translation). In Sarai's mind, she has solved the problem. It's simple: Abram visits Hagar's tent, strictly business of course, no feelings involved, bada bing, bada boom, Abram and Sarai have a child, everyone's happy, thank you Hagar you can be on your way now.

The text says that once Hagar conceived, "her mistress was lowered in her esteem" (Gen. 16.4). I interpret this to mean that somewhere along the way Hagar became important, and noticed her new importance. Sarai noticed too. She was not happy. She had thought she could handle sending her husband off to have sex with another woman. It's only sex, right? It's not like he actually loves her like he loves me, so it doesn't mean anything. And it solves our problem--I can certainly handle my husband having sex with another woman if it gets me a baby. It seems, though, that nothing went as smoothly as Sarai had planned. Feelings got involved, as they tend to when you're dealing with human beings, and Sarai got jealous. And jealousy, as the narcoleptic Argentine in Moulin Rouge! says, will drive you mad.

And the ironic thing is that, not long after this whole fiasco with Hagar, God steps in, does his miracle thing, and Sarai has her own baby. While Abram and Sarai had seen no solution to their childlessness but to make up their own rules, and according to logic there was no other solution, God saw one. Had they consulted him, he probably would have told them to just wait another year or two. To be patient. But did they ask? As far as the text says, no. And the best thing of all this is that God, being the merciful father that he is (as opposed to the vengeful dictator the Old Testament often seems to portray him as), provides them with this happy solution to their problem even though they acted like silly children and did their own thing.

III (the mutant child). It occurs to me that in my relentless pursuit of solutions, I am often too much like Sarai. I don't trust God to take care of me, so I try to fix everything myself, and I run the risk of ruining everything I'm trying to fix. Now, I'm the last person to say you should sit around and wait for God to step in and fix everything for you. I don't think God wants that; he wants us to think for ourselves, to come up with our own solutions, but then to ask him if that's a good solution before we jump in headfirst. 'Cause, you know, he probably knows that that Hagar chick is nothing but trouble.

IV. Despite what I've just said, I really think Hagar is the victim in all this. She was only doing what Sarai told her to do.

V. In an unrelated note, I'm considering converting to Buddhism.